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liberality, the learning, and the munificence of those whose 

 names he has rendered familiar as household words to our 

 ears. Let me first ask, What has science done for Liverpool ? 

 and then inquire, what Liverpool has done for science. We 

 possess no monuments of a remote antiquity, to recall to our 

 minds, in trains of dreamy thought, so delightful to those who 

 are occasionally subject to their influence, the mail-clad 

 knights, and tonsured monks, the lists and tournaments, and 

 all the pomp and pageantry of barbaric war. We have no 

 ties to unite the present with the former times — no asso- 

 ciations which, dissevering us from the present, and the out- 

 ward, and the palpable, send us back into ourselves, and cause 

 us to dwell, and five, and move amid the ideal and the past ; 

 thus, so to speak, leading us to feel within ourselves a two- 

 fold life, and verifying, as it were, the belief of the ancient 

 philosopher, who was conscious within himself of a duality 

 of existence. Not on those grounds does Liverpool become 

 endeared as a residence ; neither do we augment our rapidly 

 progressing population by wanderers attracted to our town 

 and its vicinity by the picturesque scenery around us, nor 

 by the salubrity of our locality, nor yet by the amenities of 

 a fashionable watering place. How is it that commerce has 

 abandoned her ancient abodes of Alexandria, and Venice, 

 and Genoa, and has here established her reign, in what was, 

 in the days of their high state and proud prosperity, nothing 

 but an unwholesome swamp, the retreat of the bittern and 

 the heron ; and has constituted this the second (were it per- 

 mitted to me to cast my glance into no very distant future, I 

 should declare it the first) commercial city in the world ? To 

 what is this change owing ? To what but to science, sub- 

 serving well-directed enterprise, and guiding the native ener- 

 gies of the Saxon race ; which has opened up to us unknown 

 continents, and tracked out new paths upon the ever shifting 

 surface of the boundless ocean, as fixed and as unerring as 



